This places them in the top 1.3% of income, globally speaking. In contrast, an American living near the poverty line lives on 20 times as much, and the average American college graduate lives on about 107 times as much. Over 700 million people live on less than $1.90 per day. And this often means focusing on the people who are most neglected by the current system – which is often those who are more distant from us. It’s common to say that charity begins at home, but in effective altruism, charity begins where we can help the most. Providing basic medical supplies in poor countries Why this issue? Members of the effective altruism community helped to create the Apollo Programme for Biodefense, a multibillion dollar policy proposal designed to prevent the next pandemic. This model can be repeated when we face the next pandemic. As one of the only advocates for this intervention, 1DaySooner has signed up over 30,000 volunteers, and played an important role in starting the world’s first COVID-19 human challenge trial. In this type of vaccine trial, healthy volunteers are deliberately infected with the disease, enabling near-instant testing of the vaccine. When COVID-19 broke out, members of the community founded 1DaySooner, a non-profit that advocates for human challenge trials. In 2016 Open Philanthropy – a foundation inspired by effective altruism – became the largest funder of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, which is one of the few groups doing research to identify better policy responses to pandemics, and was an important group in the response to COVID-19. In effective altruism, once a big and neglected problem has been identified, the community then looks for solutions that have a chance of making a big contribution to solving the problem, and are neglected by others working on that issue, which brings us to. (See more on the comparison in footnote 4.) Not to mention, a future pandemic could easily be much worse than COVID-19: there’s nothing to rule out a disease that’s more infectious than the Omicron variant, but that’s as deadly as smallpox. For instance, the US invests around $8bn per year preventing pandemics, compared to around $280bn per year spent on counterterrorism over the last decade. Researchers in effective altruism argued as early as 2014 that, given the history of near-misses, there was a good chance that a large pandemic would happen in our lifetimes.īut preparing for the next pandemic was, and remains, hugely underfunded compared to other global issues. One issue that seems to match those criteria is preventing pandemics. The aim is to find the biggest gaps in current efforts, in order to find where an additional person can have the greatest impact. People in effective altruism typically try to identify issues that are big in scale, tractable, and unfairly neglected. Here are some examples of what they've done so far, followed by the values that unite them: What are some examples of effective altruism in practice? Preventing the next pandemic Why this issue? They try to find unusually good ways of helping, such that a given amount of effort goes an unusually long way. They’re not united by any particular solution to the world’s problems, but by a way of thinking. People inspired by effective altruism have worked on projects that range from funding the distribution of 200 million malaria nets, to academic research on the future of AI, to campaigning for policies to prevent the next pandemic. This means that by thinking carefully about the best ways to help, we can do far more to tackle the world’s biggest problems.Įffective altruism was formalized by scholars at Oxford University, but has now spread around the world, and is being applied by tens of thousands of people in more than 70 countries. For instance, some charities help 100 or even 1,000 times as many people as others, when given the same amount of resources. This project matters because, while many attempts to do good fail, some are enormously effective. It’s both a research field, which aims to identify the world’s most pressing problems and the best solutions to them, and a practical community that aims to use those findings to do good. If you want to learn even more, we recommend reading the Effective Altruism Handbook or participating in one of our fellowships ! IntroductionĮffective altruism is a project that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice. The piece below is an adaptation of “ What is Effective Altruism? ” from.
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